1843 - Sir John Isaac Thornycroft was born (d. 28 Jun 1928). English naval architect and engineer who made fundamental improvements in the design and machinery of torpedo boats and built the first torpedo boat for the Royal Navy.

1844 - Eduard Adolf Strasburger was born (d. 18 May 1912). German plant cytologist who elucidated the process of nuclear division in the plant kingdom .

1896 - Alfonso Caso y Andrade was born (d. 30 Nov 1970). Mexican archaeologist and government official who explored the early Oaxacan cultures and is best remembered for his excavation of Tomb Seven at Monte Albán.

1905 - Emilio G. Segrè was born ( d. 22 Apr 1989). Italian-born American physicist who was cowinner, with Owen Chamberlain of the United States, of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1959 for the discovery of the antiproton

1905 - Lloyd Viel Berkner was born (d. 4 June 1967). U.S. physicist and engineer who first measured the extent, including height and density, of the ionosphere (ionized layers of the Earth's atmosphere), leading to a complete understanding of radio wave propagation and he helped develop radar systems .

1908 - Manuel II de Portugal ascende ao trono. In 1911, Thomas Jennings is found guilty with the first use of fingerprint evidence in the U.S. He was convicted at the Criminal Court of Cook County for killing Clarence B. Hiller.

1941 - Anatoly Firsov was born in Russia (d. 2000). USSR ice hockey player (Olympics-gold-1964, 68, 72). Leading scorer in the 1968 Olympics with 12 goals and 4 assists in seven games. He was European championship 7 times, and world championship 8 times.

1944 - DNA was identified as the hereditary agent in a virus, published in a report by O.T. Avery, Colin MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty. This crucial discovery in molecular genetics - that genetic information is carried in the nucleotide sequence of DNA - arose incidentally while studying pneumococcus to monitor the epidemic spread of pneumonia.

1958 - Clinton Joseph Davisson dies (b. 22 Oct 1881). American experimental physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1937 with George P. Thomson of England for discovering that electrons can be diffracted like light waves, thus verifying the thesis of Louis de Broglie that electrons behave both as waves and as particles .

1959 - Texas Instruments was issued a patent on the integrated circuit .

1976 - George Hoyt Whipple dies (b. 28 Aug 1878). American pathologist whose discovery that raw liver fed to chronically bled dogs will reverse the effects of anemia led directly to successful liver treatment of pernicious anemia by the American physicians George R. Minot and William P. Murphy. This major advance in the treatment of noninfectious diseases brought the three men the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1934.

1976 - Werner Heisenberg dies (b. 5 Dec 1901) Werner Karl Heisenberg was the German physicist and philosopher who discovered a way to formulate quantum mechanics in terms of matrices (1925). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for 1932.

1841 - Sam Loyd was born (d. 10 Apr 1911). Samuel Loyd was an American puzzlemaker who was best known for composing chess problems and games, including Parcheesi, in addition to other mathematically based games and puzzles.

1881 - Joseph Augustine Cushman was born (d. 16 April 1949). U.S. paleontologist and geologist known for his work on paleoecology as shown by Foraminifera (marine protozoans). He was the most well-known foraminiferologist of his time.

1882 - Anna Pavlova was born in St. Petersburg [Feb. 12, New Style] (d. 23 Jan. 23). Russian ballerine. The most celebrated dancer of her time.

1884 - Theodor Heuss was born (d. 1963). German politician and publicist.

1902 - Julian H. Steward was born (d. 6 Feb 1972). American anthropologist best known as one of the leading neoevolutionists of the mid-20th century and as the founder of the theory of cultural ecology

1929 - Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer was born. German physicist, Nobel Prize laureate in 1961, with Robert Hofstadter of the United States, for his researches concerning the resonance absorption of gamma-rays and his discovery in this connection of the Mössbauer effect.

1961 - Ham the Chimp travels into outer space. The U.S. launched a 4-year-old male chimpanzee named Ham on a Mercury-Redstone 2 rocket into suborbital flight to test the capabilities of the Mercury capsule.